You did well enough at Nationals to go to Switzerland, right? I think I got second and Karla got fourth. I got invited to a World Cup in Switzerland, but I didn’t feel like part of the team. The coach was an asshole, this Austrian skier. He’d say stuff like, “You have no skills, no technique, I don’t know how you are going to race.” I was like, “I’m going to die.” Then I did the race and did nearly die—I crashed so bad I had to get helivaced out. They took me to a hospital in Germany. I had a super-bad concus-sion, bruised vertebrae in my neck. A year before I had met these Swiss dudes at Blunt Brothers [cannabis shop] in Vancouver. I wrote down their information and they were like, “If you’re ever in Switzerland, call us up.” So I called them from the hospital: “Remember me?” They drove from Switzerland to come get me. I never saw the coach, the team, never heard from them, not even a phone call to check in. I ended up flying home early with a really expensive helicopter and hos-pital bill. I had a strong disdain for organized snowboarding after that. That’s understandable. Then you started filming? That was the beginning of the low point when I didn’t snowboard for a couple years. I felt like I completely failed. I internalized that experi-ence. It was supposed to be my chance to make it, to show my parents I can go to the Olympics. I got really depressed and started having a lot of anxiety. I didn’t know what was wrong. I felt sick all the time. I couldn’t eat anything. I kept going to the doctor and he would say, “Try this prescription, or this other one.” Once he gave me a prescrip-tion for rosacea—I was like, “Dude, it’s my stomach!” Eventually he gave me this sample pack of what I now know to be strong SSRI 31 antidepressants. He didn’t give me any other info other than I should “try taking these.” I took them for a couple weeks and they made me feel really sick to my stomach—they had a lot of bad side ef-fects. I was working at a skate shop at the time, and I kept having to go into the back because I felt like I was going to throw up. So I was like, “They’re making me feel worse. I’m going to stop taking them.” I didn’t realize that the worst thing you can do is stop taking them suddenly. Shortly afterward I spiraled into a gnarly mental health crisis. I told my mom and she took me to the hospital. They put me in this youth mental health program where I was assigned a psychiatrist, and he was such an asshole. He diagnosed me with schizophrenia—he never asked me any questions about that medication I was on. They medicated the shit out of me. I was on 6 to 10 different prescriptions at any given time—tranquilizers, benzos, anti-psychotics, which make you gain weight so fast. I went from thinking, “I want to be an athlete,” to feel-ing like people were laughing at me when I went out in public. When I saw people I knew, they didn’t even recognize me. 1 Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. They turned me into a zombie. I couldn’t get out of bed. I felt like I slept for a year and a half. I probably did because I didn’t want to be awake anyway. I tried to tell the doctor I wasn’t hearing voices, but he told me that’s because I’m on the right medication. I was like, “I’m pretty sure I don’t have what you think I have,” and he would say, “People who have schizophrenia never think they have it.” I was put in a safe house where they monitor everything you do. I was on good behavior, so I was allowed to go to the grocery store to help shop for group taco night. We’d make dinner together and I was sitting at the table with these kids who were severely mentally ill, and I was looking at them thinking, “I don’t belong here.” I would question myself, “Am I hearing voices?” Then I’d just forget because I was too zonked out on tranquilizers. I remember being in a room with my parents and that psychia-trist. He asked about my goals and I told him I wanted to be a pro snowboarder. He said, “You need to be more realistic with your ex-pectations. If you can work a normal job and be off disability one day, consider yourself a success story.” Eventually I started taking myself off some of the medication. I’d see if the withdrawal was manageable. I did it slowly, without telling anyone. I came back to life. I started boarding again. SilverStar got some boxes in the park and I started hitting those. Jibbing seemed easy. The boxes were way wider than the balance beam was in gymnastics. This is when you found your path? I really started to get fired up again. I was doing rail contests, the [Vol-com] Peanut Butter [and] Rail Jams. I ended up getting an invite to girl’s [Ms.] Superpark from [ Snowboarder Magazine Creative Director] Pat Bridges. Just from doing those events? I was driving to [Canada Olympic Park] in my mom’s car for a contest and I picked Bridges up hitchhiking. I didn’t know who he was, but he was doing a story on hitchhiking. We went to COP and I ended up riding with him. I was tossing hand plants up on the wall ride and probably eating shit, but it made an impression. Then I won the Peanut Butter finals in California a couple of years later and I wrote to him: “Hey Pat, I heard about Superpark, do you think I could get in?” He wrote back: “Superpark isn’t a rail jam, but I guess you can come.” To this day, we still laugh about it. I was doing a slopestyle contest right before Superpark and I was desperate to win some prize money for my trip to California. I crashed really bad and caved in my ribs, which cut my liver open. It wasn’t a good scene. I was in the ICU for two weeks. I must have been 22 years old and I thought I had just missed my last chance to go to the States, to have my big shot at Superpark, to finally get noticed. JESS KIMURA 075
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 18.4: Page 75
